Object-oriented ontology

[Edward theurj Berge]

In my research today I came upon this interesting article, “Here comes everything: the promise of object-oriented ontology” by Timothy Morton. (New link, old one broken.) It is of interest not only to speculative realism but also to some recent discussions on Caputo's ontology, modes of apprehension of such, and quantum theory. The article is 27 pages of text so I've culled some excerpts, lengthy in themselves.

 

Excerpts:

 

Speculative realism...asserts the deep mystery of a Non-Nature....object-oriented ontology (OOO)...goes further than this, rejecting essentialist Matter.... OOO is a form of realism that asserts that real things exist--these things are objects, not just amorphous “Matter”.... OOO extends Husserl's and Heidegger's arguments that things have an irreducible dark side: no matter how many times we turn over a coin, we never see the other side as the other side--it will have to flip onto “this” side for us to see it, immediately producing another underside. Harman simply extends this irreducible darkness from subject–object relationships to object–object relationships.... Causation is thus vicarious in some sense, never direct. An object is profoundly “withdrawn”--we can never see the whole of it, and nothing else can either.... We've become so used to hearing “object” in relation to “subject” that it takes some time to acclimatize to a view in which there are only objects, one of which is ourselves.

 

The notion of the “withdrawal” of objects extends my term strange stranger to non-living entities. Strange stranger names an uncanny, radically unpredictable quality of life forms. Life forms recede into strangeness the more we think about them, and whenever they encounter one another--the strangeness is irreducible....the uncanny essence of humans that Heidegger contemplates extends to nonhumans.... The more we know about a strange stranger, the more she (he, it) withdraws. Objects withdraw such that other objects never adequately capture but only (inadequately) “translate” them....This is what “irreducible” means.

 

Rhetoric is not simply ear candy for humans: indeed, a thorough reading of Plato, Aristotle and Longinus suggests that rhetoric is a technique for contacting the strange stranger....[it] amplifies imagination rather than trying to upstage it, and it revels in dislocation, not location.... Harman's imagery differs from ecophenomenological ecomimesis that confirms the localized position of a subject with privileged access to phenomena.... Harman's rhetoric produces an object-oriented sublime that breaks decisively with the Kantian taboo on noncorrelationist scientific speculation....ekphrasis is not about the reaction of the (human) subject, but about rhetorical modes as affective-contemplative techniques for summoning the alien.

 

The aesthetic, as we shall see, is the secret door through which OOO discovers a theory of what is called “subject”.... Melancholia is precisely a mode of intimacy with strange objects that can't be digested by the subject.... To lapse into Californian, OOO is so about the subject. There is no good reason to be squeamish about this. The more the ekphrasis zaps us, the more we fall back into the gravity well of melancholy. Sentience is out of phase with objects, at least if you have a nervous system. So melancholia is the default mode of subjectivity: an object-like coexistence with other objects and the otherness of objects--touching them, touching the untouchable, dwelling on the dark side one can never know, living in endless twilight shadows. If the reader has experienced grief she or he will recognize this state as an object-like entity that resides somewhere within the body, with an amortization schedule totally separated from other temporalities (in particular, the strict digital clock time of contemporary life). Through the heart of subjectivity rolls an object-like coexistence, none other than ecological coexistence--the ecological thought fully-fledged as dark ecology . The inward, withdrawn, operationally closed mood called melancholy is something we shake off at our peril in these dark ecological times.

 

Melancholy starts to tell us the truth about the withdrawn qualities of objects. OOO thus differs from theistic ecophilosophy that asserts, “There is a Nature.” It maintains no absolute distance between subject and object; it limits “subject” to no entity in particular. Žižek's suspicion of SR to do with the “feminine” self-absorption of objects: precisely what he doesn't like about Buddhism. Changing “self-absorption” to “withdrawal” or “operational closure” discloses what's threatening about Buddhism: an object-like entity at the core of what is called subjectivity. Like ecomimesis, Harman's passage affirms a real world beyond mentation. Unlike ecomimesis, this world doesn't surround a subject--it's a world without reference to a subject.

 

If OOO construes everything as objects, some may believe that it would have a hard time talking about subjects--indeed, Slavoj Žižek has already criticized SR in general along these lines. This subjectivity is profoundly ecological and it departs from normative Western ideas of the subject as transcendence. Thus we see off Nature and its correlate, the (human) subject. I argue that OOO enjoins us to drop Matter just as we must drop Nature, and that this means that it can save the appearance of the most coherent and testable physical theory we have, namely quantum theory.

 

Let's turn our attention to... things....how far “down things” does OOO really go? Are these things made of some kind of substrate, some kind of unformed matter? Does “withdrawal” mean that objects are impenetrable in some non-figurative, nonhuman sense? Do objects have a spatial “inside”? Surely they might. But the principle of irreducibility must mean that this inside is radically unavailable. It's not simply a case of the right equipment passing through it, like a knife through butter. Even a knife through butter would not access the butter in all its essential butteriness. The proliferation of things that ecology talks about--from trees to nuclear power--do not compromise a holistic Nature. Nor yet are they comprised of some intrinsic, essential stuff. To dispatch Matter, we must explore the most rigorous and testable theory of physical Matter we know: quantum theory.

 

Unlike some thinkers who discovered OOO in spite of deconstruction, I backed into OOO through deconstruction. SR tends to mistake deconstruction for nominalism, subjectivism and Meillassoux's correlationism.... Contemporary physics concurs with a principle tenet of Lacan and Derrida: there's no “big Other,” no device, for instance, that could measure quantum phenomena without participating in these phenomena. All observations are inside the system, or as Derrida puts it, “There is nothing outside the text” (or, in Gayatri Spivak's alternative, which I prefer, “There is no outside-text”). Arkady Plotnitsky has traced the affinities between deconstruction and quantum physics. People commonly misconstrue “there is no-outside-text” as nominalism: we can only know things by their names. Far more drastically, the axiom means: (1) Any attempt to establish rigid boundaries between reality and information results in unsustainable paradoxes; (2) Language is radically nonhuman--even when humans use it. It would be a mistake to hold that (1) is correlationism. “There is no outsidetext” occurs in a passage in which Derrida is analyzing Rousseau's position on Nature, so it's worth pausing here since this issue is directly relevant to ecocriticism. Derrida tacks close to the text he’s analyzing, which is why he appeals to close readers in the first place. He is not making a sweeping generalization about reality. Derrida is only saying, “Given the kind of closed system textuality that Rousseau prescribes, there is no outside-text.” That is, Rousseau can’t go around making claims about nature, not because there is nothing out there, but because the way he models thinking sets textuality up as a black hole....[but] Derrida abstained from ontology: he considered it tainted by the generalization-disease. Unfortunately this defaults to various forms of antirealism. Derrida's is a sin of omission.... OOO shares one thing at least with deconstruction--refraining from assertions about some general essence or substance at the back of things that guarantees their existence.

 

OOO is troubling for materialisms that rely on any kind of substrate, whether it consists of discrete atoms or of a continuum.... Certain uncontroversial facts, demonstrable in highly repeatable experiments, shatter essentialist prejudices concerning Matter.... Quantum phenomena are not simply hard to access or only partially “translated” by minds and other objects. They are irreducibly withdrawn.

 

OOO is form of realism, not materialism. In this it shares affinities with quantum theory. Antirealism pits quantum theory against its opponents, since quantum theory supposedly shows reality is fuzzy or deeply correlated with perception and so forth. In fact, quantum theory is the only existing theory to establish firmly that things really do exist beyond our mind (or any mind). Quantum theory positively guarantees that real objects exist! Not only that--these objects exist beyond one another. Quantum theory does this by viewing phenomena as quanta, as discrete “units” as described in Unit Operations by OOO philosopher Ian Bogost. “Units” strongly resemble OOO “objects.” Thinking in terms of units counteracts problematic features of thinking in terms of systems. A kind of systems thinking posed significant problems for nineteenth-century physicists. Only consider the so-called black body radiation problem. Classical thermodynamics is essentially a systems approach that combines the energy of different waves to figure out the total energy of a system. The black box in question is a kind of oven. As the temperature in the oven increases, results given by summing the wave states according to classical theory become absurd, tending to infinity.

 

By seeing the energy in the black box as discrete quanta (“units”), the correct result is obtained. Max Planck's discovery of this approach gave birth to quantum theory. Now consider perception, for the sake of which antirealism usually cites quantum theory. What does quantum theory show about our mental interactions with things? Perceptual, sensual phenomena such as hardness and brilliance are at bottom quantum mechanical effects. I can't put my hand through this table because it is statistically beyond unlikely that the quanta at the tip of my finger could bust through the resistance wells in the quanta on the table's surface. That's what solidity is. It's an averagely correct experience of an aggregate of discrete quanta. This statistical quality, far from being a problem, is the first time humans have been able to formalize supposedly experiential phenomena such as solidity. What some people find disturbing about quantum theory (once in a gajillion times I can put my finger through the table) is precisely evidence for the reality of things. (This is a version of an argument in Meillassoux, AF 82–5).

 

Quantum theory specifies that quanta withdraw from one another, including the quanta with which we measure them. In other words quanta really are discrete, and one mark of this discreteness is the constant (mis)translation of one quantum by another. Thus when you set up quanta to measure the position of a quantum, its momentum withdraws, and vice versa. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that when an “observer”--not a subject per se, but a measuring device involving photons or electrons (or whatever)--makes an observation, at least one aspect of the observed is occluded (QT 99–115). Observation is as much part of the Universe of objects as the observable, not some ontologically different state (say of a subject). More generally, what Niels Bohr called complementarity ensures that no quantum has total access to any other quantum. Just as a focusing lens makes one object appear sharper while others appear blurrier, one quantum variable comes into sharp definition at the expense of others (QT 158–61). This isn't about how a human knows an object, but how a photon interacts with a photosensitive molecule. Some phenomena are irreducibly undecidable, both wavelike and particle-like. The way an electron encounters the nucleus of an atom involves a dark side. Objects withdraw from each other at a profound physical level. OOO is deeply congruent with the most profound, accurate and testable theory of physical reality available. Again, it would be better to say it the other way around: quantum theory works because it's object-oriented.

 

Probing the quantum world, then, is a form of auto-affection. Bohr argued that quantum phenomena don't simply concatenate themselves with their measuring devices. They're identical to it: the equipment and the phenomena form an indivisible whole (QT 139–40, 177). This “quantum coherence” applies close to absolute zero, where particles become the “same” thing.

 

Implication and explication suggest Matter being enfolded and unfolded from something deeper. Even if it were the case that OOO should defer to physics, in the terms set by physics itself objects aren't made “of” any one thing in particular. Just as there is no top level, there may be no bottom level that is not an (substantial, formed) object.

 

To this extent, “object” (as a totally positive entity) is a false immediacy. Positive assertions about objects fail because objects have a shadowy dark side, a mysterious interiority like the je ne sais quoi of Kantian beauty. Is this nothing at all? Is there a path from the carnival of things to a bleak nothingness? Nihilism, believing that you have no beliefs, maintains that things emerge from an impenetrable mystery. Nihilism, the cool kids' religion, shuns the inconveniences of intimacy. We have objects--they have us--under our skin. They are our skin. OOO can't be a form of nihilism. It's the opposite view (relationism) that tends towards nihilism. Relationism holds that objects are nothing more than the sum of their relations with other objects. This begs the question of what an object is, since the definition implies a potential infinite regress: what are the “other objects”? Why, nothing more than the sum of their relations with other objects--and so on ad obscurum. At least OOO takes a shot at saying what objects are: they withdraw. This doesn't mean that they don't relate at all. It simply means that how they appear has a shadowy, illusory, magical, “strangely strange” quality. It also means they can't be reduced to one another. OOO holds that strangeness is impossible if objects are reducible to their relations. Since relationism is hamstrung by its reluctance to posit anything, it tends towards obscurantism. Relationism is stuck in a Euthyphronic dilemma: objects consist of relations between other objects—and what are those objects? An object as such is never defined. So while ecological criticism appears to celebrate interconnectedness, it must in the end pay attention to what precisely is interconnected with what.

 

This radical finitude includes a strange irreducible openness.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Bryant in this recent post:

"In the past I’ve argued that objects are independent of their relations.  Today I think this view is erroneous."

[Balder]

Wow.  Nice to see him acknowledging the separator is the connector, as LP likes to say, but also as we argued from the beginning of this thread, when first coming across his claims about the non-dependence of objects on relations.  That position never seemed consistent, to me, even with the fuller scope of his own thought.

His reflections here remind me also of Gendlin's recent writings on body-constitution, which I referenced in my "Opening Space" paper.

[Edward theurj Berge]

And similar to some of my ruminations on boundaries here referencing this thread, and here from earlier in this thread.

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Objects are more or less independent of relations if viewed from the surface realm where "classical objects" are the content of "reality." But if reality actually has a real ("ontological," as the physicists are prone to say) depth dimension/axis to it, then object independence is "not so much." Instead quantum entanglement is the rule. The rules of the "game" are different in the quantum substratum of reality (at this point we might need to introduce a term like total reality, so as to distinguish a depth-dynamic reality from the surface aspect of total reality that we are so accustomed to calling "reality."). Bohm and Hiley say that part of the "rules" in the quantum substratum is that it is "non-local." If viewed horozontally (on the level of the quantum substratum or "progam," since it is analogous to a computer video program in which the "game" has different rules and goals and means and values) then "simple location" (Whitehead) no longer applies. At the surface, in the realm of "classical objects," the rule of simple location applies, but does not apply in the "lower/deeper" game, in reality's basement, so to speak. Other rules are different as well. For instance in the surface game, things are moved around or rearranged mostly by action. But at the quantum or subquantum levels of reality something more like mental intention or focalized awareness that chooses to visualize and stack the quantum probability cards in a certain direction seems to be how the smudgy objects there are moved and rearranged. 

I did a "basement" consciousness experiment the other day. Whether it was just a thought experiment like Einstien's trolly car thought experiment or was an actual physical-interacting experiment I do not know for sure. But I'm inclined to think there was some crossover into the surface. That is to say that I believe that my "actions" (my kinesthetically felt visualizations) in the basement may actually have had an effect on the first floor level of the "house" of reality. 

How many times while rooting for our team during a sports event to we want to "wish" them into success. Modern flatland reality can see this only as primitive magical thinking. It is but voodo fantasy, and it doesn't seem to be able to make our team win anyway. The avid fan looks for rituals to try to link the mental intention sort of "act" with the actual physical game in which his or her team is participating. Several funny TV commercials show these bizzare superstitious rituals. We assume it is a kind of playful insanity that adds ambiance to the sport. We endorse a little of this kind of insanity, even though it's not "real." 

Or ... do we sense that there might be some means to do this "magic," despite our rational mind's acknowledgement that there is no statistical advantage to wearing a certain hat or doing a certain dance or closing our eyes (the ultimate act of sacrafice!), which might actually work even though those don't really work. In other words, on some (deeper) level do we really believe in something like a mind-directed quantum mechanics?  Those irrational superstitious rituals may not work, but they point us in the direction of some similar mental action that does work at least some of the time or to some degree. If reality up here at the surface realm of classical objects is more like standing on the edge of a cliff than we realize (tha cause and effect relationship is more precarious than we assume) then the subtlest of mental intention nudges might push the outcome either over the cliff or back onto the familiar ground of good old more or less linear cause and effect. Those insane magical rituals are just symbols our intuitive belief in a similar reality over-ride. But it would not be a reality over-ride if in fact reality has a basement (or multiple basements) that can somehow crossover into the surface game, similar to a video gamer using a "cheat code." 

Here's my experiment: 

My oldest son, Adam, was playing an adult league recreational indoor soccer game. Since the whole thing was not all that important, I thought it might be a good chance to see if I could "care" inwardly but without caring too much or allowing high-resistance effort to prevent the basement activity from crossing over into the activity on the first floor. I had practiced other inside-out visualizations recently, so the type of mental exercise did not seem that strange to me. These two factors, low caring and relative familiarity seemed to be a good set-up for my quantum mechanics experiment. 

My son's team was behind 1-0 at halftime. I decided to begin to center in the basement of reality, not quite at the actual game level but in an imagined space of potential actions below it. The key, or so I hypothesised is to allow my mind to successfully straddle the basement level potentiality with the first floor actuality. To tilt one way or the other too much would prevent successful crossover of quantum influence upon causal events in the actual soccer game. 

I began to "see" and "feel" potential paths of my son's team's ball-kicks into their goal. I started off vaguely envisioning walls on the other end in order to divert the other team's kicks from going in their goal. I kind of put a force field up to protect my son's team from being scored on. 

 I soon noticed that a greater frequency of ball trajetories did seem to stream toward near scores while I was maintaining the "successful" visioning. Before long my son's team did score, tying the game. 

While I thought my invisible force field had helped also with defense, it soon seemed to break down and my son's opponents scored about three or four straight goals in a fairly short time. 

I was of course tempted to end the experiment since it was obviously not working. But then I recalled the feeling sense I had of a loose connection between my envisionings and the actual events. I also told myself that I probably suck at actually doing the quantum mechanics very effectively, so perhaps the execution, not the theory, was the problem. 

My mind then sensed that some of my ineffectiveness might have been the duality nature of my helping out with my son's team's defense. A separate function for blocking shots is not using the whole energy field enough. A mental gap was allowed between defense and offense. I was letting first floor assumptions interfere with the basement game's rules. 

So I visualized a u-turn or hook stream of motion. I forgot to say earlier than my visualizations were of streams of light. They were seen as lightlike but felt as grooves. I was sculpting light grooves in the "basement" just below the actual soccer game. 

This modification seemed to "work." Now more and more of the action tilted towards my son's team's likelihood of scoring. Within one minute to go my son's team was only one point down. And the momentum was still going their way. Then during one of their offensive drives one of their players got injured (It looked like the ACL injury l got myself and my younger son also got later on while playing indoor soccer). This ate up the clock, preventing any chances to tie the game. 

Like the fans in the beer commercials I felt as though I had shifted the momentum of the game. When I told Adam he took it as mere superstition. And I admitted that it might well have been, but that at the very least the exercise seemed to leave some sort of "strands of soft hope" in me. It was a faith exercise, but one that absolutely required the belief in a depth-dimension to reality. Otherwise it was not faith but was encantations and magic. The whole exercise was about revealing something deeper than ego and regular making-things-happen by physical force or other "control" dynamics. 

One other thing was clear to me. There was no direct relationship between any specific envisioned light groove and specific actual outcomes (scores). The effect (if real at all) was indirect and somewhat time-delayed as though requiring a build-up of the energy of directive thoughts. 

Part of the reason I was willing to engage in such insanity was that once while I was in an outdoor game I saw myself make a header goal. Seconds later I almost scored a header goal (hit the post and bounced out). I Never, ever, managed to score a header goal. My skills for soccer were very low, and the chance of the vision happening to correspond with reality was next to zero. This had the feel of a high syncronicity event, possibly psychoid event in which me mental intention almost overrode normal reality. I also had a dream on night that my basketball skills were like magic. The next day I could sling the ball up about any way I wanted and it would go through the hoop. It was the "hottest" I've ever been at shooting a basketball. Another time I was unusually focussed on the horseshoe post while playing horseshoes at a church picnic. My concentration was off the hook during that period of time. I am not even a skillfull horseshoe player and have seldom played and never practiced. And yet I was hitting one ringer after another. Soon a small crowd of observers gathered around. Not long after that I began to be aware of reality or ego or both and the unbelievable streak became believably over. 

The modern version is of course the motivational clarity of such concentrations/visualization unlocking my human potential to score at basketball and horseshoes. But this is why my basement soccer game experiment was significant. I was not in this game. Except by means of a quantum basement.

I am currently inclined to believe that "grace is within our grasp," but only if we can lower our mental resistance and float to the basement of reality. At that level "our" and "success" is much different, not nearly as cut and dried. More transpersonal and more more-or-less.

darrell 

theurj said:

Bryant in this recent post:

"In the past I’ve argued that objects are independent of their relations.  Today I think this view is erroneous."

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Two more "basement" crossover experiences. To provide context, "Mark" was my best friend who died of cancer last year. When death looked iminent, he agreed to try to make contact from the other side with me. These are two of five evidences of "contact." 

These two accounts are from Layman and my book About Wholeness (now at Amazon), in a chapter called "Extra Awareness." : 

On the way home from attempting to meet my nephew (we had

miscommunicated and my nephew no-showed) at a restaurant where Mark

and I had occasioned in the past, I mindfully listened to some of Mark’s easy

listening jazz music which I inherited from him. I suppose I had Mark on my

mind, since I had just left one of his familiar haunts. That’s probably what inspired

me to fire up his music and to groove on it. Mindful listening to music was

his favorite meditation technique, which he practiced throughout his adult

life, starting as a young man. He mentored me on the technique, but I only

managed to do it about twice while he was alive. Still, I accepted it as a viable

meditation tool. I just had other techniques that were my “default programs”

for meditating and/or contemplative experiences.

But this particular day, upon hearing songs from Mark’s jazz collection

while driving home, I went right into a mindful hearing of each note, followed

by a focus on hearing the different sounds (bass notes, etc.) come together as

a whole symphony. The exercise worked. I was really in the “groove.”

In fact, the music had me feeling so deeply meditative that I decided

to pull over and meditate some more at a local river which I had used for

that purpose many times and which had collected memories of Mark and

other friends. I had used the river as a “sacred space,” my own personal

“geomancy” (the interaction of spirits or spiritual phenomena with specific

physical locations). I meditated there at the river for about fifteen minutes

and went home.

About two or three hours later, as my wife was coming home from her

work, she called me on the cell phone and asked how my youngest son’s

interview with his school’s principle. The principle was his boss, since he is a

teaching assistant in the same high school. My son has been waiting to step

into a full teaching job which he went to college for. He got a bachelors degree

in special education. In the school system where my youngest son, John, is

employed, the full teaching job for special education is called “intervention

specialist.” It is a more supervisory role than the traditional classroom teacher

position, but teaching nonetheless. The interview with the principle was an

attempt to lubricate the wheels, so to speak, in order to help him progress

toward reaching his goal of getting the intervention specialist job.

While describing the outcome of John’s interview (as conveyed from

John to me by phone earlier) I was trying to think of the best word for my

son’s reason for talking with his principle/boss. The word “contact” then

came to my mind for the first time. Just as I said that word out loud our cell

phones “dropped” the call.

Within minutes however, Becky (my wife) was home. She told me that the

weirdest thing had happened. When the call terminated, her phone indicated

Layman Pascal and Darrell Moneyhon 215

that she was getting an incoming call. Her phone read “Mark Cowart” from

her contact list, thus indicating that Mark was trying to call her!

I was, of course, “blown away,” since my rational mind is unaware of

any technical explanation. If a name popping up from the contact list is

something which might randomly happen following dropped calls, why then

of her list of about 40 contacts or so would it just happen to be Mark’s

number? The odds seemed pretty slim that such a synchronistic event would

occur by chance alone. I consider the event highly “synchronistic” because

of the meditative “connection” I had from meditating in Mark’s way and by

having him in mind only a few hours earlier. This was something rare for me

to have done—not something I had done or do on a regular basis. I believe it

was the first time I had used his mindful listening technique since his death.

What were the odds of Becky’s cell phone indicating an incoming call from

THAT name?

Either Mark followed through with his plan once again, or my deepercentered

mind happened to wave-collapse quantum potentials in a way that

expressed what was on my mind. The unusual event seemed to be the result

of either this “materialization/manifestation” or contact from the other side.

I suppose it could have also been caused by a combination of the two. Mark

could have contacted my mind, after which my mind did its quantum thing.

Regardless of just how this rare event came about, it makes for one hell of a

(I prefer “one heaven of a,” but it most likely is “one limbo of a”) ghost story!

There was one other successful “contact.” That contact had occurred a

month or two prior to the phone call from the other side. The medium of

contact was Mark’s mandolin, a precious keepsake which Mark’s sister gave

me in addition to Mark’s CDs. Like so many of my mystical true stories, this

one starts with a dream:

Last night I dreamed a beautiful sounding folk song. I got up (but still in

my dream) to get my guitar to play the tune. There in my false awakening I

found to my surprise that several of my guitar strings were missing and that

even some of the tuning pegs were no longer where they are normally located.

I saw three of four of these pegs then on the floor near where my guitar was.

I was amazed: “How did the pegs get out of my guitar and over there on the

floor?”

When I woke up (for real this time) I soon realized that it was a kind of

self assessment of my own body. My body/guitar was feeling quite broken or

unstrung. Also the tuning theme matched well with my thoughts about the

hilarity of trying to “recalibrate” my body the day before while trying to play

basketball for the first time in many years.

216 about wholeness

As it turns out, when you are much older and heavier, the legs just don’t

respond to the mind’s commands as they did when you were younger. My

body’s lag, and sometimes total failure, in responding to my intentions was

frustrating, but it was also quite entertaining. It seemed better to laugh than

to cry, so I laughed inwardly at myself. Once I decided it was better to laugh

than cry or get angry from frustration I had fun “clowning around,” even

though I was actually trying to do my best. I silently laughed at this “clown”

trying to play basketball. The physical limitation which had inserted itself

in the years between the last time I played basketball and the current time

required a significant recalibration between my mind and body.

I never managed to get the mind/body recalibration just right, but I did

finally get it through my thick head that my legs were not going to spring

me up during a layup as they once had. After an hour or so of trying to play

basketball I at least came a bit closer to “playing within my game” (adjusting

sensibly to my limitations).

This real-life “recalibration” experience was probably a major inspiration

for the need of musical recalibration as implied by my dream’s tuning pegs

and dislocated strings. As in real life, during the dream I was having difficulty

properly “tuning” my “instrument.”

Later in the day following the dream (two days after the basketball fiasco)

I went to turn on the light in my living room area. My light switch is a round

dial that can change the intensity of the lighting once you depress it in order

to activate an on/off switch. When I went to press the dial, in order to activate

the light, something was strange. There was just a peg-like thing there.

My mind actually second-guessed itself and assumed that the light switch

was a regular flip-it type, forgetting for an instant that this particular light

switch was not that type. Of course I soon realized that the light did not

respond like a normal flip type. Plus I also began to remember and properly

identify the type of switch it was. Then I figured out that the exterior dial had

come off. “How on earth did that happen?” I thought. It has never happened

before (nor has it since). I found it on the floor under a table a few feet away

from the wall.

My mind then “saw” the match between the real-life situation and the

situation in my dream. Something had mysteriously gotten out of place.

Something dealing with calibration or tuning (only in real life it was the light

intensity-adjusting mechanism instead of a sound/pitch-adjusting mechanism

or a mind/body-adjusting mechanism). My sense of surprise in waking life

was an exact match with the dream experience. The tuning mechanism being

on the floor was also an exact match. The unexpected shape of the light

Layman Pascal and Darrell Moneyhon 217

switch was a very close match because it was about the same size and shape as

the guitar tuning pegs of my dream guitar.

And the real guitar? It sits in its case on top of a cabinet shelf next to

the light switch. The guitar is only two or three feet away, a bit higher and

slightly to the left of the switch!

Later I connected a few more dots. This is the point where Mark and his

project of contacting me from the other side comes into the story.

The guitar was not the only object near the light switch that mysteriously

lost its cover and revealed its tuning peg-like stem.

Mark’s mandolin was sitting right in front of my guitar on the top of

the cabinet. By the way, it needs tuning. I misplaced Mark’s electronic tuner

(which I also inherited) and have not gotten around to matching notes to

those on my guitar in order to tune the mandolin. The tuning end of the

mandolin is positioned nearest the location of the light switch, facing the

opposite direction of my guitar, as though the two instruments cross in the

same way Mark’s life and my life intersected or crossed.

As I indicated earlier, Mark’s sister had given me the mandolin after

he died. I’ve enjoyed having it in my possession, as both a souvenir and as

a musical instrument. I wrote a song while playing it a few months ago. I

was sitting on Mark’s deck at the time. I had just finished mowing his yard

in order to help maintain his property until his sister could sell the house.

Although mowing his yard after he was gone was tough emotionally, when I

played his mandolin on his deck (where I had accompanied him with guitar

in the past) it was as though Mark was still jamming with me, using my own

fingers to play his part. What a happy and healing moment.

Mark would care about the fact that mandolin needed a good tuning.

It’s tuning condition would affect the quality of the music. He would likely

try to remind me to do what his own fingers no longer can. “Darrell, go tune

my mandolin!”

Note also that this was the instrument with which he and I made beautiful

music together while he was alive. This is no run-of-the-mill object. It is a

highly meaningful object.

But even as a plain old object, it was frequently physically interacted

with—was touched and held. The physical make-up of the mandolin might

have acted like a conduit and battery in relation to Mark’s “energy.” The very

molecules of the mandolin might have stored some of his “vibrations.”

In other words, both the meaning and the matter of the mandolin might

have contributed to making it a connective device for crossover from the

other side to here.

218 about wholeness

I failed to mention earlier that in the dream the dislocated guitar strings

were nylon instead of steel. I noticed this as being odd. In reality, the

mandolin’s strings, while not made of nylon, are thinner and more pliant

than guitar strings. They at least approximate the quality of nylon strings.

This little detail seemed to be another cue used to draw my attention to the

mandolin once I woke up from the dream.

Perhaps the communication from the other side to this side, as well as

from this side to the other side, is done by harmonics. Harmonics does seem

to be a way which frequencies from other bands of electromagnetic energy (or

electromagnetic-like energy) than we normally access just might crossover.

The whole process would be similar to how the harmony of love can get

two or more “objects” (beings) to form meaningful unions which lead to

new creations, including new life. If harmonics are in fact a key element to

learning how to communicate or traverse spiritually, then no wonder my

dream was all about music!

When I allowed my mind to accept the possibility that it was Mark

communicating with me, then I experienced an energy rush which felt like

he was present, as though to confirm the hypothesis—as though Mark was

saying “yes” in the language of psychic sensations. I spent some “quality time”

with Mark’s energy for awhile. I never saw his face, never heard his voice, nor

had any other tangible evidence of a “visit.” All I had was the feeling of his

presence. But that was enough.

Was it possible that the “tuning” in the dream was really about learning

to mentally/spiritually change frequencies, so as to aid connection with Mark

on the “other side,” thus completing one more round of fulfilling our pact to

make contact? Did another telekinetic type of crossover (like the bedsprings

being compressed the night of Mark’s death and like the light flickering on

and off during Mark’s funeral) occur in the form of knocking off the dial

to the light switch? And had my dream given me the heads up to notice the

exposed peg and its proximity to meaningful musical instruments in order to

help me “connect the dots?”

Who really knows?

All I really know is that Mark has left his mark in my life in numerous

ways. Some in the regular touch-my-heart way. Some (or so I now believe) in

a clear-across-the-dimensional-divide sort of way.

darrell

Darrell R. Moneyhon said:

Objects are more or less independent of relations if viewed from the surface realm where "classical objects" are the content of "reality." But if reality actually has a real ("ontological," as the physicists are prone to say) depth dimension/axis to it, then object independence is "not so much." Instead quantum entanglement is the rule. The rules of the "game" are different in the quantum substratum of reality (at this point we might need to introduce a term like total reality, so as to distinguish a depth-dynamic reality from the surface aspect of total reality that we are so accustomed to calling "reality."). Bohm and Hiley say that part of the "rules" in the quantum substratum is that it is "non-local." If viewed horozontally (on the level of the quantum substratum or "progam," since it is analogous to a computer video program in which the "game" has different rules and goals and means and values) then "simple location" (Whitehead) no longer applies. At the surface, in the realm of "classical objects," the rule of simple location applies, but does not apply in the "lower/deeper" game, in reality's basement, so to speak. Other rules are different as well. For instance in the surface game, things are moved around or rearranged mostly by action. But at the quantum or subquantum levels of reality something more like mental intention or focalized awareness that chooses to visualize and stack the quantum probability cards in a certain direction seems to be how the smudgy objects there are moved and rearranged. 

I did a "basement" consciousness experiment the other day. Whether it was just a thought experiment like Einstien's trolly car thought experiment or was an actual physical-interacting experiment I do not know for sure. But I'm inclined to think there was some crossover into the surface. That is to say that I believe that my "actions" (my kinesthetically felt visualizations) in the basement may actually have had an effect on the first floor level of the "house" of reality. 

How many times while rooting for our team during a sports event to we want to "wish" them into success. Modern flatland reality can see this only as primitive magical thinking. It is but voodo fantasy, and it doesn't seem to be able to make our team win anyway. The avid fan looks for rituals to try to link the mental intention sort of "act" with the actual physical game in which his or her team is participating. Several funny TV commercials show these bizzare superstitious rituals. We assume it is a kind of playful insanity that adds ambiance to the sport. We endorse a little of this kind of insanity, even though it's not "real." 

Or ... do we sense that there might be some means to do this "magic," despite our rational mind's acknowledgement that there is no statistical advantage to wearing a certain hat or doing a certain dance or closing our eyes (the ultimate act of sacrafice!), which might actually work even though those don't really work. In other words, on some (deeper) level do we really believe in something like a mind-directed quantum mechanics?  Those irrational superstitious rituals may not work, but they point us in the direction of some similar mental action that does work at least some of the time or to some degree. If reality up here at the surface realm of classical objects is more like standing on the edge of a cliff than we realize (tha cause and effect relationship is more precarious than we assume) then the subtlest of mental intention nudges might push the outcome either over the cliff or back onto the familiar ground of good old more or less linear cause and effect. Those insane magical rituals are just symbols our intuitive belief in a similar reality over-ride. But it would not be a reality over-ride if in fact reality has a basement (or multiple basements) that can somehow crossover into the surface game, similar to a video gamer using a "cheat code." 

Here's my experiment: 

My oldest son, Adam, was playing an adult league recreational indoor soccer game. Since the whole thing was not all that important, I thought it might be a good chance to see if I could "care" inwardly but without caring too much or allowing high-resistance effort to prevent the basement activity from crossing over into the activity on the first floor. I had practiced other inside-out visualizations recently, so the type of mental exercise did not seem that strange to me. These two factors, low caring and relative familiarity seemed to be a good set-up for my quantum mechanics experiment. 

My son's team was behind 1-0 at halftime. I decided to begin to center in the basement of reality, not quite at the actual game level but in an imagined space of potential actions below it. The key, or so I hypothesised is to allow my mind to successfully straddle the basement level potentiality with the first floor actuality. To tilt one way or the other too much would prevent successful crossover of quantum influence upon causal events in the actual soccer game. 

I began to "see" and "feel" potential paths of my son's team's ball-kicks into their goal. I started off vaguely envisioning walls on the other end in order to divert the other team's kicks from going in their goal. I kind of put a force field up to protect my son's team from being scored on. 

 I soon noticed that a greater frequency of ball trajetories did seem to stream toward near scores while I was maintaining the "successful" visioning. Before long my son's team did score, tying the game. 

While I thought my invisible force field had helped also with defense, it soon seemed to break down and my son's opponents scored about three or four straight goals in a fairly short time. 

I was of course tempted to end the experiment since it was obviously not working. But then I recalled the feeling sense I had of a loose connection between my envisionings and the actual events. I also told myself that I probably suck at actually doing the quantum mechanics very effectively, so perhaps the execution, not the theory, was the problem. 

My mind then sensed that some of my ineffectiveness might have been the duality nature of my helping out with my son's team's defense. A separate function for blocking shots is not using the whole energy field enough. A mental gap was allowed between defense and offense. I was letting first floor assumptions interfere with the basement game's rules. 

So I visualized a u-turn or hook stream of motion. I forgot to say earlier than my visualizations were of streams of light. They were seen as lightlike but felt as grooves. I was sculpting light grooves in the "basement" just below the actual soccer game. 

This modification seemed to "work." Now more and more of the action tilted towards my son's team's likelihood of scoring. Within one minute to go my son's team was only one point down. And the momentum was still going their way. Then during one of their offensive drives one of their players got injured (It looked like the ACL injury l got myself and my younger son also got later on while playing indoor soccer). This ate up the clock, preventing any chances to tie the game. 

Like the fans in the beer commercials I felt as though I had shifted the momentum of the game. When I told Adam he took it as mere superstition. And I admitted that it might well have been, but that at the very least the exercise seemed to leave some sort of "strands of soft hope" in me. It was a faith exercise, but one that absolutely required the belief in a depth-dimension to reality. Otherwise it was not faith but was encantations and magic. The whole exercise was about revealing something deeper than ego and regular making-things-happen by physical force or other "control" dynamics. 

One other thing was clear to me. There was no direct relationship between any specific envisioned light groove and specific actual outcomes (scores). The effect (if real at all) was indirect and somewhat time-delayed as though requiring a build-up of the energy of directive thoughts. 

Part of the reason I was willing to engage in such insanity was that once while I was in an outdoor game I saw myself make a header goal. Seconds later I almost scored a header goal (hit the post and bounced out). I Never, ever, managed to score a header goal. My skills for soccer were very low, and the chance of the vision happening to correspond with reality was next to zero. This had the feel of a high syncronicity event, possibly psychoid event in which me mental intention almost overrode normal reality. I also had a dream on night that my basketball skills were like magic. The next day I could sling the ball up about any way I wanted and it would go through the hoop. It was the "hottest" I've ever been at shooting a basketball. Another time I was unusually focussed on the horseshoe post while playing horseshoes at a church picnic. My concentration was off the hook during that period of time. I am not even a skillfull horseshoe player and have seldom played and never practiced. And yet I was hitting one ringer after another. Soon a small crowd of observers gathered around. Not long after that I began to be aware of reality or ego or both and the unbelievable streak became believably over. 

The modern version is of course the motivational clarity of such concentrations/visualization unlocking my human potential to score at basketball and horseshoes. But this is why my basement soccer game experiment was significant. I was not in this game. Except by means of a quantum basement.

I am currently inclined to believe that "grace is within our grasp," but only if we can lower our mental resistance and float to the basement of reality. At that level "our" and "success" is much different, not nearly as cut and dried. More transpersonal and more more-or-less.

darrell 

theurj said:

Bryant in this recent post:

"In the past I’ve argued that objects are independent of their relations.  Today I think this view is erroneous."

[Balder]

Hi, Darrell, I just looked on Amazon and found your and Layman's About Wholeness book.  Do you not have a book cover for it yet?

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Am assuming it will be there soon. Also Kindell version is supposed to be coming. I informed Book Whirl of the hyphens instead of dashes typos in the brief blurb about the book. Also, hope the valuabel "Look Inside" feature comes with the self publishing package. If not, I'll pay extra to have that installed. I think most of these features will appear in a week or so. 

 Thanks for checking out the book. Your two ESP accounts are in the Extra Awareness chapter. They start off the extra awareness anecdotes. 

Thinking about offering a weekly technique from the book, with brief text excerpts for context. Am processing this initiative with my co-author Layman. He has his "weekly harangues." If he feels this is getting decent traffic then whatever he uses for that (Facebook, I think) might be the best vehicle we could use for that marketing ploy. We could offer a paralell of it here either by link, paste-in, or otherwise. This all is of course if Layman agrees to this. 

Darrell

darrell

Balder said:

Hi, Darrell, I just looked on Amazon and found your and Layman's About Wholeness book.  Do you not have a book cover for it yet?

[Edward theurj Berge]

Going back to this post and the 3 following re: Bryant's comments on Lacan's 'plus-one,' something has been nagging my subconscious on it. Bryant's description of the +1 as an empty function that doesn't participate in the discussion, and has no special knowledge of the topic discussed, yet functions to focus discussion enough for participants to make a decision reminds me of a couple of things.

One, the role of facilitator. In a recent work group we had a professional facilitator that knew nothing about our specialized, professional topic. The discussion went this way and that, with various experts waxing eloquently on various tangents. The facilitator had a syllabus of topics and goals and kept interrupting to bring the focus back to those tracks and goals by clarifying what someone said and separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of aforesaid structure by organizing the content and writing it on the whiteboard. This prevented endless sidetracking and dominant voices while keeping the discussion focused and allowing for consensus decisions.

The other thing that has been nagging me is the role of the Fool in Tarot. See this wiki, for example. Like Lacan's empty function, the Fool traditionally was neither a member of the regular cards, the court cards or the Trumps. S/he (hermaphroditic) wasn't so much a category unto itself but rather a condition for the categories/cards. This is why it is assigned the number 0. In pre-Golden Dawn decks, i.e, pre-occult symbolism, the Fool is a pauper that carries whatever minimal possessions s/he has on a pole. Often his/her clothes are tattered, an apt depiction of our modern homeless with their shopping carts. S/he is one who doesn't participate in our conventional culture, the job, family, house, etc.

More like the wandering ascetics of bygone India. Meaning when one intentionally chose that path, not the millions of poor destitute that now roam India's streets and countrysides. So in that sense our Fool is not poor by an unjust system so much as by choice, that s/he has the resources to be whatever s/he wants, to assume the role of any card in the deck, but instead chooses this empty place holder in the deck. S/he reminds us of that empty capacity in each of us that can fulfill/full any role or place when necessary, sort of like differance/khora. It's a function that can trump even the Trumps. And perhaps by keeping this in mind it keeps our decisions open, contingent, knowing that they may be good enough given the present circumstances but that they can change in an instant when circumstances change. It's sort of a paradox that we can be certain about uncertainty and change. And that we are mere fools to suppose otherwise in playing out our typical roles/cards.

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

I played the role of jumping in with metaphysical experiences that only metaphorically resemble the topic of a forum "basement." My poverty has been the lack of with-it-ness. And yet my off-target metaphors such as experiencing a soccer game from a basement perspective might be the sort of tattered clothes that the fool wears. Only those who pick up on the metaphorical ressonance of the fool's half-baked and largely uninformed utterances (all the while the fool believing that his poetic impressions would somehow fit in a behind the scenes or beneath the floor sort of way) could appreciate the power of 0. But "space" can sometimes breathe new life into "place." The fool function is one of bringing space to place. 

Or not. 

darrell

theurj said:

Going back to this post and the 3 following re: Bryant's comments on Lacan's 'plus-one,' something has been nagging my subconscious on it. Bryant's description of the +1 as an empty function that doesn't participate in the discussion, and has no special knowledge of the topic discussed, yet functions to focus discussion enough for participants to make a decision reminds me of a couple of things.

One, the role of facilitator. In a recent work group we had a professional facilitator that knew nothing about our specialized, professional topic. The discussion went this way and that, with various experts waxing eloquently on various tangents. The facilitator had a syllabus of topics and goals and kept interrupting to bring the focus back to those tracks and goals by clarifying what someone said and separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of aforesaid structure by organizing the content and writing it on the whiteboard. This prevented endless sidetracking and dominant voices while keeping the discussion focused and allowing for consensus decisions.

The other thing that has been nagging me is the role of the Fool in Tarot. See this wiki, for example. Like Lacan's empty function, the Fool traditionally was neither a member of the regular cards, the court cards or the Trumps. S/he (hermaphroditic) wasn't so much a category unto itself but rather a condition for the categories/cards. This is why it is assigned the number 0. In pre-Golden Dawn decks, i.e, pre-occult symbolism, the Fool is a pauper that carries whatever minimal possessions s/he has on a pole. Often his/her clothes are tattered, an apt depiction of our modern homeless with their shopping carts. S/he is one who doesn't participate in our conventional culture, the job, family, house, etc.

More like the wandering ascetics of bygone India. Meaning when one intentionally chose that path, not the millions of poor destitute that now roam India's streets and countrysides. So in that sense our Fool is not poor by an unjust system so much as by choice, that s/he has the resources to be whatever s/he wants, to assume the role of any card in the deck, but instead chooses this empty place holder in the deck. S/he reminds us of that empty capacity in each of us that can fulfill/full any role or place when necessary, sort of like differance/khora. It's a function that can trump even the Trumps. And perhaps by keeping this in mind it keeps our decisions open, contingent, knowing that they may be good enough given the present circumstances but that they can change in an instant when circumstances change. It's sort of a paradox that we can be certain about uncertainty and change. And that we are mere fools to suppose otherwise in playing out our typical roles/cards.

[Edward theurj Berge]

And another thing. Recall this discussion about how I saw my role in integral world. I've taken the underview that seeks those hidden assumptions in any theory, especially IT. Which reminds me of Mark Edwards' statement about deconstruction here:

"An integral metastudies should not be seen as a rational project of integrating every perspective, concept, paradigm, or cultural tradition within its domain. There must be some things that, by definition, lie outside of its capacities to accommodate and explain. Consequently, an integral metastudies needs a decentering postmodernism that it cannot integrate, that lies outside of its scientific and systematic purview, which continually challenges it and is critical of its generalizations, abstractions, and universalizings. The decentering form of particularizing postmodernism is not something that integral metatheory can locate or neatly categorize somewhere within its general frameworks. Decentering postmodernism will always provide a source of critical insight and substantive opposition to the generalizing goals of an integral metastudies."

It's not something that can be integrated in IT, as if it were a prior level that precedes and is subsumed by IT, the next and better level. It is an underview that informs and challenges any and every view at any and every level. And perhaps I am a just fool for thinking I can fulfill the role of the Fool or the plus-one, some grandiose delusion that needs medical attention. And/or both/neither. Whatever and nevertheless.

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

Just got around to reading the first half of the start of this post. Pretty heady or technical writing that is not easy for me to understand, but as I read I matched more and more the gist of what seemed to have been said there to an insight I had independently before ever reading the post:  I was thinking about the reality of video-game-like frames of reality stacked in depth levels, where the deeper levels are more "real" in terms of "total reality" or "overall reality," and yet the surface levels of reality are quite real in and of themselves. If you are in a video game or God's dream, the objects in that video game or dream are still "real." They may not be ultimately real, but if you are there and interacting with them, they are real. To say they are but an illusion is not very realistic. They are. They are what they are -- most totally real or not. They are as real as that program depth level allows. And even if the program is superficial and in many ways but an illusion as compared to the deeper levels of total reality, it is, in an up-creating (Kevin Kelly) sort of way, a legitimate or "real" part of total reality too. Theologically if our "standing out," existing, here in this physical dimension represents only the created, not the Creator, the Creator's alleged desire for us to love Him, Her, or It out of our free will choice is something quite real that creates a more complete Creator. A Creator loved by the created is more full, complete, whole. The Whole One is made even more whole by His created objects/beings. The Seventh Day of the Genesis Creation story reflects that up-creation phenomenon. The Creator gets a sense of perfection or goodness from his otherwise arbitray constructions. The artwork uplifts and fulfills the Artist. Interesting that God's greatest power is not during days 1-6 when objects were being made. The greatest power is contemplative awareness of the interconnections or relationships of the objects with the Source Itself. The Power of the Seventh Day was a non-physical group hug. It was a mentally achieved synergy. The lesser objects then danced in the total chemistry of life. They danced in the darkness from which they seemed to emerge at the very start of the Creation construction process. On day Seven, God saw "inistence" (lying or resting in) within and through the "standing out," existence. Inistence, like Bohm and Hiley's "implicate order," makes the objects in Relationship to all that possibly can be. Inistence becomes the vantage point from which all the video games and dreams that unfold from the Dreamer/Creator/Mind can be seen as super or supra objects, in relation to Mind itself. 

 More down to earth, in a little old human mind: while dreaming I can see the object in my dream. If I sense that the object is an outflow of my mind that is creating the drama that is my reality in the dream, then the object is still real but is no longer as firmly attached to the level of reality of the dream frame or reference. If you were to ask me during this more lucid dream state, "Is that object there real?," I would be able to insightfully reply "The object is real, but it is not there, because there is no real there there." The object's reality is only truly "located" in the mind itself. The projection is located in the projector's light energy flow outward onto some screen (or cave wall). The apparent "there" of the reality frame is not really there at all. God's Creation was not "good" because it was really there. It was good because the projection from Mind was contemplatively reclaimed as seamlessly connected to Mind or Creator or Projetor itself. The seventh day was a realization of the unified field of all of Creation. It "located" all objects in Mind, which is neither here, there, or any where.

Objects are irreducibly real, but "thereless." The object is there, but there is no there there. Not really really. 

darrell

 

[Darrell R. Moneyhon]

The "subjective" reality then is when the objects at a given level of reality are sensed from a deeper level of reality. If your reality is really a video game, then when you have a subjective sense of experiencing the objects in that video game, then you are looking at the video game from a deeper level than where the game itself is playing out. It is like sensing that there is a "cheater code" that could affect the game. There is something more than this game. Subjectivity is not less real, it is more real. It just might not fit the rules of the superficial realities of the video game. And for the subjective experience to actually tap into the deeper reality "cheater codes" it must go more than just a little deeper than the reality frame of the video game. If it only goes a little deeper then it only brings in odd distortions. If the Projector can trace its projected images far enough back to Itself, then the cheater codes or reality overrides can be tapped into and used. First the participant at any given depth level must realize that the objects are real in the sense of "worth attending to as though real" but that there is no object there. This de-spatializing is what the child prodigy was saying about the spoon to Neo when telling him how to bend spoons with your mind. The prodigy said there is no spoon. I translate this (at least for now, to the best of my understanding) as that object you hope to bend is an object that can be bent but only if you realize the object is not really there. You have to realize that the only true location of the object is in Mind, and not allow your mind to take the object as really there. If your mind takes the object as really there, then you lose lucidity. You lose your mind. On the other hand if you take the child prodigy too litterally and deny the object, the spoon, then you wake up too much from the dream and cannot bend the spoon. You have to accept the object as real enough but not so real (not "there," not strictly "as given") that it can't be bent. When lucid in a dream reality you can levitate the self object and can mentally guide other objects. I mentally guided a basketball into the hoop in a recent dream. I didn't deny the reality of the basketball. If I had, I would have just left the reality frame called my dream altogether. I would have simply woke up from the dream. I would have been too outside of that reality frame to affect it. Instead I used Christ's suggestion of being "in that world, but not of that world." When I accepted the basketball and the world in which it existed, but was able to also simultaneously not be of that world (to see that there was no there there -- to understand the hollowness of that surface manifestation of deeper, more real, reality) then I was free to mentally guide the ball. This requires a sense of humor. You take the basketball seriously enough to give a damn about it, but you also know that it is just a joke. It really doesn't matter all that much whether you can succeed at getting the ball in the hoop. Once you get a sense of humor about the "game" however, you can then "play" with the reality and go ahead and mentally guide the ball into the hoop. 

darrell

darrell 

Darrell R. Moneyhon said:

Just got around to reading the first half of the start of this post. Pretty heady or technical writing that is not easy for me to understand, but as I read I matched more and more the gist of what seemed to have been said there to an insight I had independently before ever reading the post:  I was thinking about the reality of video-game-like frames of reality stacked in depth levels, where the deeper levels are more "real" in terms of "total reality" or "overall reality," and yet the surface levels of reality are quite real in and of themselves. If you are in a video game or God's dream, the objects in that video game or dream are still "real." They may not be ultimately real, but if you are there and interacting with them, they are real. To say they are but an illusion is not very realistic. They are. They are what they are -- most totally real or not. They are as real as that program depth level allows. And even if the program is superficial and in many ways but an illusion as compared to the deeper levels of total reality, it is, in an up-creating (Kevin Kelly) sort of way, a legitimate or "real" part of total reality too. Theologically if our "standing out," existing, here in this physical dimension represents only the created, not the Creator, the Creator's alleged desire for us to love Him, Her, or It out of our free will choice is something quite real that creates a more complete Creator. A Creator loved by the created is more full, complete, whole. The Whole One is made even more whole by His created objects/beings. The Seventh Day of the Genesis Creation story reflects that up-creation phenomenon. The Creator gets a sense of perfection or goodness from his otherwise arbitray constructions. The artwork uplifts and fulfills the Artist. Interesting that God's greatest power is not during days 1-6 when objects were being made. The greatest power is contemplative awareness of the interconnections or relationships of the objects with the Source Itself. The Power of the Seventh Day was a non-physical group hug. It was a mentally achieved synergy. The lesser objects then danced in the total chemistry of life. They danced in the darkness from which they seemed to emerge at the very start of the Creation construction process. On day Seven, God saw "inistence" (lying or resting in) within and through the "standing out," existence. Inistence, like Bohm and Hiley's "implicate order," makes the objects in Relationship to all that possibly can be. Inistence becomes the vantage point from which all the video games and dreams that unfold from the Dreamer/Creator/Mind can be seen as super or supra objects, in relation to Mind itself. 

 More down to earth, in a little old human mind: while dreaming I can see the object in my dream. If I sense that the object is an outflow of my mind that is creating the drama that is my reality in the dream, then the object is still real but is no longer as firmly attached to the level of reality of the dream frame or reference. If you were to ask me during this more lucid dream state, "Is that object there real?," I would be able to insightfully reply "The object is real, but it is not there, because there is no real there there." The object's reality is only truly "located" in the mind itself. The projection is located in the projector's light energy flow outward onto some screen (or cave wall). The apparent "there" of the reality frame is not really there at all. God's Creation was not "good" because it was really there. It was good because the projection from Mind was contemplatively reclaimed as seamlessly connected to Mind or Creator or Projetor itself. The seventh day was a realization of the unified field of all of Creation. It "located" all objects in Mind, which is neither here, there, or any where.

Objects are irreducibly real, but "thereless." The object is there, but there is no there there. Not really really. 

darrell